May 5th, 2009 by Rocky Mountain Jew
3 Comments Yiddish is alive and well.*
Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union revives the in-danger-of-dying language in a most creative way: the author imagines an alternate history, where Jews fleeing Hitler’s Europe are granted refuge in the Alaskan wasteland. The local language is Yiddish, and Chabon has “updated” the language for the 21st century.
In an interview with the New York Times, Chabon gives readers an inkling as to how he created his Yiddish slang. “…a sholem is a gun — a bit of wordplay, as ’sholem’ in Yiddish means peace, and ‘piece’ is slang for gun in English.” [More...]
January 20th, 2009 by Rocky Mountain Jew
2 Comments Today has finally arrived. The culmination of so much, and, concomitantly, the final death knell in a coffin that’s been sealed long ago.
Over the past week, the media’s been full of stories on Bush’s legacy. These opinions pieces have typically varied between outright condemnation coupled with relief and those desperately attempting to salvage something good from the past eight years. Usually it’s the fact that no terrorist attacks have taken place on US soil since 9/11. For those more generous, aid to Africa may be cited.
Today, however, there is a decided turn. The coverage is off Bush and onto our new president - from predictions of Obama’s inaugural speech to a euphoric heralding of a new era.
Despite the bleak economic situation, the excitement is palpable. A new leader, accompanied by a new(ish) crew. Change is finally coming.
No doubt about it, Obama et. al. will have an extremely difficult time ahead.
But just for a moment, just for this one day, it’s feels nice inhaling a fresh breath of air.
December 26th, 2008 by Shana Goldberg
1 Comment As I’ve mentioned in earlier entries, a holiday highlight for me is settling in with the ever-growing pile of books I’ve accumulated, well, since the last holiday, and getting stuck into some good reading.
And then, logging on this morning to write this very entry, I quickly perused my RSS feed for the BBC’s latest headlines, and a particular item naturally caught my attention: ‘UK playwright Harold Pinter dies‘. A devoted and outspoken leftist, the Nobel laureate originated, like so many other British Jews, from a working class family in London’s East End.
Looking over my reading list, I’m struck by just how many Jewish authors are present, or even are Jewish themed. I know what you’re thinking: obviously it’s not coincidence that a Jewish reader selects Jewish literature. And, I confess, that assumption would not be wrong. However, despite this, I find Jewish authors popping up in all kinds of genres.
For example, what with the current financial meltdown, I’ve picked up some books to re-read from my economics courses. At the top - Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents. (Turns out his discourse is not as prescient as one would have thought, but that’s an aside.)
Then there’s Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, the story of the author’s uncle, who left his native India to study and eventually settle in Europe. But, as his biography goes, the uncle befriended and married a Jewish refugee from Berlin, and the story is as much about the bitter erosion of German Jewish culture as it is about immigration from the Subcontinent.
Rounding out the list is fiction, in the form of novel by the Dutch Jewish writer Leon de Winter (website is in Dutch only). Being both well know and received throughout European literary circles, de Winter’s name is one I’d heard quite often, but unfortunately, due to my lack of language skills, his work remained inaccessible. Finally, last year Toby Press published an English translation of Hoffman’s Hunger, a Prague-set thriller taking place in the dying days of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
Luckily for me, in Switzerland 25/26 December and 1/2 January are all public holidays, so I should have ample time to make a dent in at least a few of theses books.
Have you been doing some Chanukah reading? Post a comment to share your reading list and reviews.
